Dissertation project on Social Robotics gains attention

Dr. Andreas Bischof (3rd from right) awarded with the prize for an excellent dissertation on communication. One of the first congratulators was Dr. Eberhard Alles (right), Chancellor of the TU Chemnitz. Copyright: Dresdner Gesprächskreis

During his time as a CrossWorlds PhD-student Andreas Bischof conducted ethnographic research in social robotics labs around the world. The sociologist was eagerly interested to find out, how engineers and computer scientists make robots for everyday worlds ‘social’. His participant observations in human-robot interaction resulted in a study reconstructing the social conditions of social robotics and the practices within this field of research and development.

One week earlier, the national daily newspaper F.A.Z. recognized his study as “realistic and reflected look behind the scenes” of human-robot interaction. The science journalist Dr. Manuela Lenzen wrote: “Bischof rightly raises the question of whether the design of the robots, which are supposed to live with us, can be left to such pragmatism. If tasks are broken down into technically manageable parts, the social aspects of social robotics could become shortened to an optimazation problem.” (F.A.Z., 11/11/2017, PayWall)

This entry was posted on November 20, 2017 at 9:29 am and is filed under Publications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

The Research Training Group "Connecting Virtual and Real Social Worlds" addresses the increase in digitization and its resulting virtualization of processes, communication, environments, and finally of the human counterparts. The nature and the degree of virtualization vary significantly, and they depend considerably on the context of application. In addition, media-mediated communication is always restricted in comparison with real-world communication.
Our goal is to overcome the current constraints of media-mediated communication. In doing so, we will study which new ways of interaction and communication are offered by the connection of virtual and real social worlds in comparison with the experience of immediate real interaction and communication.
The research program subdivides the connection between virtual and real social environments into the fields of: communication, emotions, sensomotorics, and learning. Research in these areas is performed within interdisciplinary research networks consisting of computer scientists and social scientists on a doctoral, postdoctoral, and on the supervisory level.
The qualification program is based on the objective of the Research Training Group, which is explicitly focused on joint technology-oriented and social-scientific-oriented media research. Seminars and workshops, some of them to be organized by the fellows, are focused on the research topics of the fellows. Furthermore, tutorials repare the fellows for the challenges of the national and international scientific community. The qualification program is completed by visits of designated guest scholars.